Letting my traumas speak, so they might be silenced.

change in thinking

Don’t get me wrong. I know how to advise about relationships. I’d make a great family therapist or marriage counselor. I marry people—to one another, of course—in ceremonies, as the ordained minister with credentials recognized by the state. Ask me about your relationship and I will give you fabulous advice about how to do your relationship well.

But the second I get involved with another human in an intimate relationship, I turn into a raging lunatic.

I literally chased a man the other night.

Ran after him.

Ran.

People, I don’t run. If a bear chases you, you lie down in a ball and protect vital organs. If a person with a gun demands something of you, you give it to them. If bullets start flying nearby, you get your body as flat to the ground and as behind cover as it can get, and you stay there. Fuck running. I have not run in years and I don’t intend to start now. But I ran to catch up with a man who was running away from me. Literally.

It’s like I give out some sort of inaudible and unintended signal that can only be heard by people who will help me create crazy in my life. A dog whistle of sorts emanates from my person. (Granted, we usually also create crazy in the bedroom, which is amazing and which I love with an intensity only matched by that of my orgasms. So, there are definitely perks.)

But I cannot figure out how not to be the most insecure woman on the planet when it comes to being in a relationship of a romantic nature. And even if the person I start the relationship with is totally secure, normal, and stable at the beginning, I make them nuts by the time we are a couple of months in, because my crazy is so intense that it spreads like a virus. And I’m not sure how to stop that.

I can keep you from getting my herpes, but not my insane, obsessive notions that I am unlovable and not good enough and being “punked” every time you attempt to love me well.

I constantly think I am being tricked into something. Into what, I do not know. But I am convinced there must be some form of deception happening. How could there not be, given my history?

It’s strange, because I see great models of what a “good man” is all around me. And I don’t mean that bullshit “real men _____” that accompanies toxic masculinity and the vomitorium that is men’s rights groups. The last thing I need in my life is some controlling, machismo, hyper-masculine ass. I’ve been with that. It didn’t go well.

When I say “good man”, I mean a balanced, thoughtful, feminist, who cares about the world and the people in it, and treats all people with respect, but offers an extra layer of that care and love to the partner in his life. My dad is one of these people, though he might not love that I call him “feminist” (I mean that you believe in equal rights for all people, Dad—which I know you totally do.) My “brother”, Adam, is one of these people. My friend, Luke, is one of these people. Andrew, Allan, Josh, Brian, Bryan, Matt, Joshua, Dan, Phillip, James, Ted, David, and the list goes on. Not to mention the long list of good women out there who model great personhood and great partnership for me to follow.

So, I see these good men and women, and then I think I pick one of these good men or women out of the lot of single people out there around me, and then things go really well for the first month, and then…

Then my mind starts to play the game where it thinks that I am not enough, so I need more and more evidence that I am enough. So, I cling and I push and I beg and I get all sorts of unreasonable. I know I am doing it on some level, I think. I used to try to deny it and to believe that I was constantly being gaslighted. (Not that I was never being gaslighted, because there was lots of gaslighting going on in my history, just not at the times that I was creating the problem.) Now I am more aware of it, and I have come to accept that I have a nervous attachment style—I need lots of assurance that the person I am with wants to be with me and considers me enough.

It has taken a long time for me to consider that valid—that need for assurance. But it makes all of the sense that I would need extra assurance, given the fact that I was locked into abusive cycles for much of my relationship history, and those cycles told me repeatedly that I was not worthy or enough. Now, I just sort of wait for the person I am with to start that cycle of abuse. And when they don’t, I start to become confused and anxious and weird.

That sounds stupid. To put the words on the page feels really strange.

To admit that I become confused, anxious, and weird when nobody starts a cycle of abuse is terrible.

It is sad.

It is devastating.

But it is so true.

So, I think that I have started it myself. I have convinced myself that now is about the time that my partner should start to treat me poorly, so I make comments or do things that cause conflict. I get angry that he leaves to go to his on-call job—even though I know he is on call. I ask if he is embarrassed to be seen with me, when he and I have just been walking down the street hand in hand. I push when he asks me to pull. I go when he asks me to stop. I accuse him of not wanting to be with me when he is with me. I do the weirdest things, because I think that conflict should happen now, and he isn’t starting it.

I’m breaking my own heart and blaming him for doing so.

Let’s be fair—bad men broke me. The toxicity of relationships prior to now was all their fault, and not my fault at all. I was captive, beaten, raped, assaulted, and abused in all sorts of ways. They are responsible for that. And part of that toxicity is seeping into my present, so they are also partly responsible for what is going on with my relational challenges today. There is no doubt that the breaking that was done before is still affecting me now, and some parts might always stay broken.

But what worries me now is that I fear that I have become toxic. What worries me today is that my only way of being in relationship has been the way of toxicity, and I might not know how to be other. I might not know how to be the partner I expect my partner to be, because of the brokenness that lingers and the places that are still wounded and scarred.

What if I have become the face of my enemy? An enemy that I was in love with, and whom I thought was in love with me, by the way, so I somehow tie love to the war that we were fighting inside our home—inside our life together. What if I can’t figure out how to love without warring?

How do I love without warring?

I suppose that is the question for which I need an answer.

And that question isn’t easily answered. Because you can give me the facts and the formulas, and you can tell me how to move forward without warring, and you can tell me how to love well, but that doesn’t mean that my psyche knows how to follow that instruction.

We all have certain areas in life where we act somewhat automatically. Muscle memory is an example of this. You don’t keep thinking through the way that you are swinging a bat or whisking some eggs or signing your name or rocking the baby. Your body remembers those sensations and it starts to do them automatically, without you having to use up conscious thoughts about how or when you perform particular movements. Your body does the things.

And I have some sort of “muscle memory” about the way I do relationships. Doing them differently takes rewriting the code that is already imbedded in my brain. It’s like trying to become left-handed after 44 years of having a dominant right hand. It’s nearly impossible, and it is excruciatingly difficult and hella frustrating.

It sucks. And I’m not certain that I am capable of making such a huge change. I am certain that making that change soon enough to salvage my current relationship will be some sort of miracle, because I have already pushed it beyond a point where anyone should decide to continue trying to love me, know me, or understand me. Once you literally chase a man down the street, things are likely beyond repair. If this man returns and states that he wants to keep trying to be in relationship with me, I will likely wonder what is wrong with him, and only become more suspicious. What kind of man would date someone so crazy??! Not a balanced, normal, secure man with healthy boundaries, right?

See, I am already planning the next wave of mistrust before I have cleared up the chaos of the last one. I’m a fucking mess when it comes to doing relationships.

Was I single for twenty years because I was focused on other things, or was I single for twenty years because I knew that this was how messed up inside I was feeling, and how poorly dating would go once I began to pursue it? It was definitely simpler to have short-term affairs with people in close proximity whom I didn’t find attractive as long-term partners. It was also morally ambiguous at best, and using people to fulfill my needs in a selfish and terrible way when you didn’t put a positive spin on things. But it got me through and kept me from having to address all of the things that I am putting on paper now.

It kept me from having to face my insecurity, my dependence on cycles of the past, my inability to move forward in healthy ways, my desire not matching my state of mental health, and the deep and difficult work that I still need to do to find balance and some semblance of “normal” in my life and relationships. Letting go of that buffer and finding myself leaning into loving someone has opened up all of those things and put my face right up in that shit. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to deal with it.

It isn’t that I don’t want a healthy, long-term relationship. I do. It is just that I have been doing the hard work of dealing with the effects of my past for so many years now, and I am very, very, very tired of doing that hard work. Opening up my heart to someone means opening up a new set of vulnerabilities and challenges and problems and ugly truths that I need to work hard to overcome.

I am so tired of having to overcome shit.

I am so tired of having to overcome shit.

That wasn’t a typo. I literally needed to write that twice, because it is doubly true.

It isn’t fair that I am forced to overcome all sorts of evils and errors and offenses and other things that other people placed upon me—things that I did not and would not choose. I keep fighting to clear away terrible things that I never gave consent for in the first place. I have to work to fix what other people broke. I have to deal with things that were forced into my life, and the perpetrators who forced this upon me, for the most part, work at nothing. Most of them have jobs, partners, good health, financial security, and what look like lives of happiness and fulfillment. Granted, things aren’t always as they seem, so I won’t claim with certainty that none of them are haunted by their past or struggling in some way. But I can say that they have much that I do not, and that I do not have those things because of the consequences of their actions. I need to overcome the consequences of their actions. And it looks as though they need to overcome very little.

I know that life isn’t fair. I can hear my mom’s voice saying it each time I think to myself or say to someone, “It isn’t fair.”

My mom would always be quick to remind me that life isn’t fair.

But maybe it should be fair.

Maybe those men who did the bad things should have to make reparations of some kind. Maybe those men should have been punished for their crimes against me, instead of rewarded by a system that honors the white man above all things and casts victims to the curb as though they were not human. Maybe I should have been protected from the abusers, or given an opposing perspective, at the very least, so that I didn’t grow up to believe that I am worthless and unlovable and cursed and terrible and shouldn’t be alive.

But life wasn’t fair, and none of those maybes became realities. So, I muddled through the unfairness with my toxic thoughts until I became the maker of my own chaos. When nobody else was here to tell me how worthless I was, I told myself.

And now that a person is getting close enough to love me, I am showing him that I am too messed up to be lovable. He didn’t say it, so I said it for him, by chasing him down the street.

He came by to check on me the next day and asked me to forgive him for arguing with me. He asked me to forgive him! He took the blame for my actions.

I offered him forgiveness. Things have been strained and he has been a bit distant since then.

I text him periodically, asking if he still wants to be with me. He replies by saying that he is very busy at work and very tired, but he will call me as soon as he can.

I’m trying to choose to believe that he is very busy with work, and that this is all there is to the story—the truth being the text taken at face value. But there is a part of me that wants to create all sorts of scenarios where that text isn’t true, and he is using work as an excuse to keep his distance until he can fade out of my life without fear of some sort of crazed retribution.

And, honestly, this post doesn’t end with a nice little resolution and a happy, encouraging anecdote, because the story here is just what I stated: I’m trying to believe what he told me is true when the “muscle memory” inside of me is screaming objections at that belief. My mind is shrieking mistrust, and that is how it will continue, unless or until I can find a way of changing that part of my mind and the perspective on my history that leads it.

The truth of the past and the truth of the present are warring. So, no, I haven’t figured out how to love without warring, because a war is happening inside of me every moment. Even if I don’t fight with the one I love, I need to fight with myself to keep on trusting and to not let the ones who broke me in the past break my present, and my future.

At the end of this post I am still where I was at the beginning:

I don’t know how to do relationships.

…but I am trying to find a way. And that is progress of some kind, I hope.

UPDATE:

Last night the chased man (definitely not the chaste man–to be clear) called and asked me what I wanted for dinner. I chose burgers, and he took me out to the best local spot for burgers.

While we ate, I was telling him about the article I wrote about our wild night and big fight and how I feel about being incapable of positive, healthy relationship where I don’t push him into madness and create chaos. And he said, “I’m going to stop you right there. No. No. There was rum involved. And nothing you did created that situation. You didn’t do that. You didn’t do anything. I know that I shouldn’t be drinking, and I have not had any liquor since the moment I left you that night, and you didn’t … no. Just no. Don’t put that on yourself. Don’t even think that for a second. I heard you say to me you forgive me, is that still true?”

I nodded in agreement, a tear rolling down my cheek.

“And you did nothing wrong, but if you feel you did I forgive that too. I think that we can work through this. I think that we are going to be fine. I still want to make this work, and I believe that it will. Unless you don’t want me around anymore?”

“Then I am with you. I would never deliberately abandon you. I would never try to harm you. I am with you.”

And all of the anxious attachment needs were met, and all of the wrongs felt righted, and dinner was lovely, even with tears in my eyes.

Maybe I overestimate my power to destroy things, and maybe I underestimated the power of this man to care for me well.

Later he took me up on a rooftop, high above all the neighboring buildings, and we watched the fireworks. It was the most amazing display I have ever witnessed! Perched above the city, as we were, we could see the shows put on at each beach, downtown, in the suburbs, and in the nearby neighborhoods. It was a 360-degree canvas bursting with light and sound, the winds starting to come up off the lake cooling our bodies, stripping down to our skivvies and dancing to his music and lying on my blanket and laughing. It was one of the most beautiful nights of my life.

The truth of the past and the truth of the present may still be warring. They may always be warring. But nights like these—when someone meets my fear and my failure and my feelings head on and not only answers with the best response but shows me something so positive to replace the negative in my mind—can do something that I hadn’t considered before now.

Nights like these can rewire the brain. Nights like these can form new memories.

And enough of these nights, added together, can make new muscle memory.

They can reform my system of beliefs about relationships and brokenness and trust and truth and love and commitment. They can rid my body and my mind of the toxins and replace them with healthier things.

There is a line in Lewis Carroll’s tales of Alice’s Adventures that reads: “‎You’re not the same as you were before,” he said. You were much more… muchier… you’ve lost your muchness.”

I’ve often liked that line, spoken to Alice about the ways that she has changed. And though the point of Carroll’s writing was to make nonsense seem like sense and sense like nonsense, defying logic at every turn, I have always identified with the nonsense in a really lovely way.

I am Alice, in so many of these moments. She is sort of tumbling through Wonderland in this state of shock. Nothing makes sense. Everything is literally and metaphorically topsy-turvy. And what she believed to be true and correct and assumed by all, is not at all true and correct and assumed.

It is disorienting to discover that what you believed was sense is, instead, nonsense.

There are plenty of times in my life when I could relate to this disorientation. There are many instances where the things I once believed turned out to be wrong or insufficient or nonsense. And that isn’t an easy process to go through. And it is a process made more difficult by those who are around you supporting the thing you once considered sense and standing in opposition.

In many ways I have gone through transformations over the course of my life. And many of them are good changes, but some are or were not positive. The trip that Alice takes doesn’t just seem to turn her into someone new, however. It takes her back to who she was in her early years. It takes her back to the space where nonsense is sense. It takes her back into imagination and wonder and fun and passion and interest and joy.

And getting to that destination isn’t easy, but it is necessary. If she doesn’t find her former self, the battle will be lost, and everything falls apart.

I think that this idea of a previous stage in Alice’s life as the best and most necessary stage is telling. That she once found this strength within her, but now lacks it, expresses a lot. It helps me see that there was a person I was, and a way that I was being, that might have been better or more necessary, even though it was an earlier and less “sensible” stage and state of being. And for me, much of that ties to my imagination and my early years.

There is this space in our development that allows for all possibilities. There is a time, especially in early childhood, when we are allowed to believe wholeheartedly that anything is possible and all the things are good and that we are safe and strong and able. And that time doesn’t last long. That time is cut short when we start to see the sense as more important than the nonsense. We start to be told what we can and cannot accomplish. We start to feel the weight of failure. We start to play less and work more. We lose touch with that fire that burned in our hearts when we believed that all the things were possible, and that nothing was beyond our reach.

I think this is the muchness that Alice is meant to rediscover—she needs to find that space where all the things are possible and nothing is beyond her reach. She needs to believe in her strength, her will, her ability, and herself. But not in her reason. In her heart.

Several years back I was living in a less than stellar situation. My cocaine addiction was being fed in the midst of a bad relationship. I didn’t really like myself or the events that were happening or the ways that life was unfolding. And I started reading and working through a book called Something More. It had all these exercises within the pages that were designed to remind you who you are at your core. Through the process of engaging with this book, I stopped wanting to engage in the life I was living. I truly did start wanting something more. And eventually my desire for more created a chasm between my partner and myself, and our relationship came to a violent end. But that end was a catalyst for a new beginning. A remaking based on a remembrance. A memory of who I was and what I wanted in early childhood began to fuel the creation of this new way of being.

It was a much improved way of being, to be sure. And it was a good way of being for some time. But, today, I find myself back in a space where I want more, and I feel like I have lost a bit of myself. I have disconnected from the desires of my heart once more, and fallen into the trap of being sensible. I have lost my muchness.

And now the question that remains: How do I find it again?

Alice falls down a hole and ends up in crazy town. I don’t think I want to fall down any holes and end up in crazy town. But falling down holes and landing in nonsense isn’t practical for most of us. We need to find another way back to our muchness.

The book Something More definitely helped me find my muchness in the past, but I don’t know that repeating that process will yield a better or different result. And the path to nonsense isn’t one that many embark upon, so there are not a lot of guidebooks to set you on your way.

So, for lack of better options, I have gone back to what apparently served us well as children—I have been incessantly asking, “Why?”

I remember when my daughter went through this stage. It was annoying and infuriating and beautiful. I quickly discovered that if I gave her the most detailed scientific explanation possible, she stopped repeating the question. For some time, I thought that I had quieted her questioning by confusing her. But, after further consideration, I realized that she wasn’t quieted because she was confused, but because the answer was believable. It was the whole truth. She knew the difference, as a toddler, between me pandering to her and me telling her the answer to her questions. And some of my answers would, at a later date in my life and hers, change. But she could tell when I was speaking what I believed to be true and when I was giving child-sized explanations that didn’t tell the whole story.

So, to get back to myself—to rediscover my core desires and beliefs and find my muchness—I am asking why until I get an answer that feels fully true and wholly believable.

That isn’t an easy process. I feels a bit like falling down a hole and landing in crazy town. And constantly questioning your reasons for beliefs and actions can, at first, feel like it is breaking you in pieces. It feels like you don’t and can’t trust yourself. It feels like judgment, if you come from a background or current environment that tends to be judgmental. And it can be really uncomfortable.

But when you keep questioning—when you continue to dig until you get to what feels like the true and full answer to the “why”—you begin to feel stronger and better and more confident in what you believe and in how you choose to act. It takes time. Lots of time. And it is worth every moment of that time. Because it is really easy to become a believer of the easy answer and to follow the path of collective “sense”, but that collective and simplistic way of approaching the world may be (as it was for me) in conflict with your deepest and truest desire.

My nonsense is better than the world’s sense.

The creative, empathic, passionate, adventurous, strong woman that I am often clashes with what might be considered common sense. When I follow my heart I end up moving 2000 miles to a new city with no job, no home, and no acceptance letter to the school I hope to attend. When I follow my heart I end up in the ghetto surrounded by a strange mix of chaos and community. When I follow my heart I break up with great people to pursue a connection more passionate and powerful than the perceived “Mr. Right” offers. When I follow my heart my business card reads “Author” and “Artist”, not M.Div.

When I follow my heart I exhibit all sorts of “nonsense”. I anger people. I frustrate people. But I connect to me, and to my understanding and my desire and my core belief, in amazing ways.

I find my muchness. I get muchier. I find me.

And we can debate for a millennium the ways that who I am may or may not be “wrong” or “bad” or “immoral”. I don’t really care to do that, but I always invite civil discussion and dialogue, so I will do so if it seems productive. But that debate won’t likely end with me changing my view, because the view is formed by the constant questioning and the finding of my muchness. I’m not going to give that up easily or quickly. I’m going to hold on to that muchness and seek to always follow my heart.

And that might look like nonsense.

I’m totally happy with it looking like nonsense to others, if it feels like the deepest truth to me. And the philosophical and theological definitions of truth don’t need to be addressed when I look to my muchness. Because no matter what moral or philosophical dilemma I am faced with, I will still look to my heart, my understanding, my experience, and my study to find the truest and most complete answer. That might not be the answer you prefer, but I am not made unique in order to become mundanely accepting of someone else’s views.

I am made for my muchness. I am made to live in it and with it and through it. I am made to use it to create a better world, to offer new ideas, to live with gusto, and to turn the world on its head and make you feel like you fell down a hole into crazy town, so that you too can investigate, pursue, and live out your own muchness.

It will look different for each of us. Because the truest and most complete answer to all of the “why’s” won’t always align. We are different people, with different knowledge and experience, and different hearts. But that doesn’t mean we cannot live together in harmony. We can do so, if we simply respect and honor the muchness of others—their opinions and beliefs and understandings and experiences and hearts.

I got into an argument with my sister the other day. There was voice raising and abrupt hanging up of phones involved. It wasn’t pretty.

Afterward, I continued to ask “why”. Because her heart says something that my heart cannot. And my heart says something that hers cannot. This is true because we are different people, with different experiences and understanding. But it didn’t break our relationship. In fact, it might grow all the stronger after the lengthy text messages following the argument that worked to express love and commitments to listen to one another’s needs more fully and respectfully. But when I sought out the why, I could see her perspective clearly and, simultaneously, know that I am firmly rooted in my perspective for really important reasons. And while my perspective feels like nonsense to her, it is sense for me.

So, I am holding on to my nonsensical muchness, with the confidence that I will continue to investigate what feels most true and whole, and with the knowledge that my views make others feel, at times, like they fell down a hole into crazy town.

I can accept that. And I can try to lower them into crazy town gently and with kindness and compassion. But I can’t give up my muchness. It takes such work to find it and hold it. Alice couldn’t hold her heart and her imagination in high regard. She lost her muchness. And so have I, but I am regaining it.

I am letting the topsy-turvy feel like home. I am allowing my own heart to speak. I am filling life with what I love. I am returning to the strength within, letting my imagination run wild, embracing the way that I have been fashioned, loving who I am, and continuing to seek out the most complete answer to the question, “Why?”.

I am opening myself to the nonsense, and refusing to be confined by the restraints of the status quo.

I was talking with my dad yesterday, and our conversation turned toward the topic of change. Particularly, we were talking about what it takes to change your mind—to move toward a new idea or concept and abandon your previous thinking. And that discussion led to some thought about how my own progression and development of thought has come about.

Admittedly, I have had experience and opportunities to gain knowledge that others have not. That knowledge and experience have definitely been part of my transition from one school of thought to another. But I sometimes feel that there is something more leading my shift in ideas. And I began to consider what that might be.

At times, I think that my childhood traumas might have had an unintended consequence of pushing me toward something new. The stark difference between what I was told and what I was experiencing motivated me to look for something that seemed more honest and authentic. And the shame and struggle of being different and feeling tainted or marked in some way caused me to seek out a framework that didn’t make me out to be some evil, sinful thing, awaiting a horrible hell where I would burn in eternal fires. (Mind you, I was feeling that way because of what was being done to me, not because of anything I had chosen to do.)

I bore the weight of many things, and I didn’t even remember some of the things until college. I was always sort of unaligned and a bit mistrusting and a tad weird, but my first year of college was the start of the journey toward full-blown PTSD crazy. Crazy isn’t a diagnosis here, but more of a title for how others began to view me. Because symptoms of rage and nightmares and flashbacks and depression and risk-taking behaviors seem like crazy to the untrained eye—and also, it would seem, to a number of professionals. (My mistrust of rural doctors is founded upon the continued failure of rural doctors—especially those of the psychiatric persuasion.) And when you are “acting crazy” you start to feel even more crazy, because you don’t really want to act out in those ways, but there is a compulsion within you that is far stronger than any reason you might try to hold onto. There isn’t really a way for the brain to rationalize away trauma, no matter how hard you try. And, for some, the harder they try, the more dissociative their condition becomes—moving toward dissociative identity disorder, which is sort of the peak of dissociative brain activity.

Luckily, my symptoms hovered in the PTSD realm. And I was also able to compartmentalize well in later years, and to push my trauma into particular and less “crazy” behaviors, like risky sex and smoking and manipulation and petty theft. While those things weren’t great for me, they helped me keep the world blind to most of the symptoms I experienced, and kept me on a more even plane, temporarily.

But, I am getting into tangent territory. And the point here wasn’t my struggle with the symptoms that arose from my childhood, but with change and shifting ideas.

I had symptoms that pushed me out into the world. I moved from city to town to city to hilltop commune to city, and I experienced life in ways that many have not. I saw poverty and abuse and homelessness and sex work and violence and mental illness and struggle of many kinds. And I saw them up close and personal, not through huffpost articles, but on the actual street and in my real life. You can’t live with and in those spaces without changing the way you think, because the truth of those things is forced upon you, and no amount of rationalizing or pontificating will make that truth go away.

But when you come back to “civilized” society after living off of trash can food and free clinics and using your body as capital, somehow the “civilized” people want you to stop believing in the truths that were evident in that other portion of your life and experience. They don’t want to hear that the poor are made so by their action or inaction. They don’t want to know that abortions happen because of careful, thoughtful consideration by intelligent and capable women. They don’t want to believe that gay people are such from birth. And no matter how many stories of civilized people with struggles I would tell, there were those who refused to believe what I knew to be true—that love lives in those people and in the midst of those challenges, and that they aren’t evil.

I remember the time when I was still attached to the thinking of my family and my hometown and the people within its boundaries. I believed in the badness of sex and drugs and curse words and poverty and moral failure of many kinds. I spoke out against abortion and thought homeless people needed to get jobs and believed that I had the right to judge others based on my superior attention to religious law. But I was wrong. I was very, extremely, ludicrously wrong.

I am fine with people being wrong due to their limited experience and understanding of a thing. I was that person. The challenge is the people who will fight to the death over their belief, which can be easily refuted with more experience and understanding.

Information is everywhere these days. You don’t have to look long or look far to grasp a greater understanding of things. But there are still many from my history or in particular circles who demand that their limited view is the correct view. They believe they have the right to judge others based on their superior attention to religious law, even when I can tell them clearly and concisely how their view of the law is incorrect. The problem, in their eyes, is the failure of my seminary training, not their understanding. And they will continue to insist upon the truth of something that is easily disproved.

Some might think that I am the same way, because I have things that I hold to and will not deny credence or accept variance. But the difference here is that I have researched and studied those things, and have not yet been offered an alternative proof. I’m not closed off and refusing to accept anything. I’m very open, or I wouldn’t be at the place I am today in my thought.

I started the shift, in some ways, when I was very young. It didn’t make sense that god is love but god didn’t rescue me from illness and abuse. I didn’t want to be in the place where I was suffering that illness and abuse. I wanted to get away. And this may have fueled my running, but it wasn’t the reason I left the ideas of my rural, religious, right-wing-esque home. I left those ideas because they were based on false assumptions and not on the truth. And when I use the term truth here, I don’t mean my opinions, but things that I have tested and found to be based in fact and supported by the stories and anecdotal evidences I have encountered.

As I moved farther from the religious teachings, and closer to the people living out a different life and expressing other ideas, I came to find that I loved learning. I loved learning so much that I decided to obtain an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees. And the more I learned, the more I discovered that those closely held ideas in my hometown were not facts. And the more I expressed facts, instead of those closely held ideas, the more I was labeled and challenged and discounted by people in that hometown.

Yesterday, when talking with my dad, I mentioned that with every degree and every new experience, I get farther in my thinking than the previous group I shared life with. My experience in Chicago and in study of social justice moved my thinking slightly “left” of that which I believed when I was in Phoenix and studying theology. My experience in Phoenix and in study of theology moved my thinking slightly left of that which I believed when I was in Sioux Center and studying philosophy. And my experience in Sioux Center and in study of philosophy moved me slightly left of that which I believed in Kansas City and Rock Rapids and Sheldon and some remote area in Oklahoma’s red hills and in studying life’s hard knocks. So, as we dissect the course of my life, we get back to small town high school days … and the people who were in the seat next to me in high school think I am so liberal that I am going to a horrible hell where I will burn in eternal fires.

And it matters not that I can put forth an argument against a literal hell so good that I got an A+ on the paper where I did put it forth while in seminary. That first community is still filled with people who view me as the crazy, liberal, leftist evil that belongs in hell fires.

I struggle to understand people who would deny the facts, and ignore every study, and refuse to accept any anecdotal evidence, and not listen to the stories of others, but hold fast to what has been proven untrue.

I’m not that type of person. I love change. I love learning. I love knowing more and being more informed and having more ideas. I love testing theories and researching topics and gathering data. I love the moment when you say, “Oh”, because you have just discovered that you were wrong. And I love the moment when you say, “Aha”, because you have just discovered that you were correct.

So, I guess the only direction that I can go as I seek the close of this post is toward encouragement. I encourage everyone reading this to open up to an idea. Just start with one. You don’t need to live on the street and be an addict and get divorced and explore your own sexuality and go to seminary and study philosophy all at once. And you don’t need to start with the idea you hold most dear. But start with something. Pick one topic and research it and talk to people affected and gather data and take information from a variety of sources, and see if you feel differently at the end of that process than you did at the beginning. You can’t manage this type of study, however, if you cannot come to it with the understanding that you might be wrong.

All of the shifts in my thinking required this one thing: the willingness to be wrong.

I had to accept that I might be wrong about what is evil and what is good. I had to accept that I might be wrong about what causes poverty. I had to accept that I might be wrong about racial injustice. I had to accept that I might be wrong about personhood from conception. I had to accept that I might be wrong about the morality and personality of sex workers. I had to accept that I might be an addict. I had to accept that I spent years fighting battles that I now am ashamed to have fought. I had to accept that I don’t know much at all. I had to accept that I don’t have all the answers. I had to accept that my concept of the divine may have been very wrong. I had to let myself be incorrect and let myself learn from others.

I might be a stubborn and belligerent gal, but I have never not wanted to learn. And this openness to ideas has caused shift after shift after shift. And those are good. Those are well researched, touched by truth, seeking the divine, open to any outcome shifts. They weren’t all easy shifts to make.

It wasn’t easy accepting that the creation story or the story of Jonah and the whale aren’t literal. It wasn’t easy accepting that the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law. It wasn’t easy to accept that a fetus is not the same as a live birth. It wasn’t easy to accept that I have white privilege. It wasn’t easy to accept that disability doesn’t devalue a person or their life. It wasn’t easy to accept that gender is fluid. But I would rather work toward accepting something with difficulty than work toward demanding a lie be accepted as truth.

And there is a chance that I am wrong about all the things I now believe. There may be new information that comes to light, or new experience that shapes my ideas, and I may be proved wrong.

Then I will need to shift again.

In many ways change is life and life is change. I believe that in order to live fully, I need to explore in ways that allow for change to happen. This includes the humility of accepting the times when I get things wrong. And I get them wrong plenty of times, but I seek to leave my ego at the door when I engage in study or conversation, so that I can keep learning from others. And as I learn, I change. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

As I change and shift, I become a better person. Contest that all you want, I won’t retract that statement. I may not become what others wish I were—I may not fit their concept of “better”. But I am better. I am more knowledgeable and more open and more kind and more considerate and more accepting than I have ever been. And one day soon, as I learn and shift and learn and shift, I will be even more so. Not because I can shoot down other people’s ideas with fabulous amounts of sarcasm and snark, but because I can listen and learn at every moment and in every stage.

When my mother started to slip toward dementia, she went through some periods of regression. Some of the comments she made were very racist. But I knew that wasn’t my mom today coming out in the moment, but it was my mother in her youth, before she made the shift from the racism of her family members and the challenges of race in Chicago during her teens. I was watching her shift in reverse, going from the loving and caring woman she became back to the girl she once was. Those early ideas were so offensive. And my mom was a much better person at 55 than at 15. If I suffer the same disease she suffered, I might someday make an anti-transgendered comment, or say something about poor people needing to work harder. But I won’t mean it. Because I have evolved past that point. I’ve become more open and more loving and more caring, just like my mom did.

And I have rocketed past my mom’s development, and the shifting of some others, but I also come behind those who have flown to the front of the pack, leading me into a new age of thought and action and understanding. I love knowing that there are others pioneering, and that I am in good company as I continue to learn and to change.

Evolving, shifting, and changing should be seen as good. None of us should be stuck in the same rut for 80 years and then die. Not just because I see transformation as positive, but because I believe that transformation and growth are at the heart of being human. We have one of the longest periods of development of any creature on earth. We change slowly. We grow slowly. We reach our pinnacle at a very late age. And I don’t think that is accidental. I think we were meant to keep changing in order to keep evolving into a better form. We are designed to move forward. We are made for shifting.

I work on creating new neural pathways and reintegrating parts of my brain all of the time. Old humans can learn new tricks. We are supposed to do so. And the more we work at learning, the healthier our brains remain as we age. Learning, which our brain needs, always begets change. It is a natural progression. And maybe your progression won’t lead you as far “left” as mine has led me. But don’t be afraid to learn and don’t be afraid to change.